In recent years, interactive Internet-based platforms that enable individuals to share, discuss and respond to user-generated content have become more and more popular. Such platforms, which are often referred to using the term “social media”, have in come cases attracted hundreds of millions of registered users worldwide within a decade. The total number of user-generated content entries such as product and service reviews, user status updates, micro-blog entries, and the like, has grown correspondingly, and continues to grow rapidly. A number of the vendors providing social media platforms have attempted to monetize some of the user-generated content, for example by attempting to target advertisements to users deemed likely to be interested in the corresponding products or services.
Several types of user-generated content, especially on review web sites, may contain data that can potentially be useful to various business entities in ways not directly related to advertising, e.g., in understanding which products or services are working well and which need to be modified, or in identifying the specific nature of the shortcomings in their current portfolios of products and services. However, because of the unstructured nature of at least some parts of the content, and because of the rapid rate at which the content is growing, it may not be straightforward to extract useful insights that could in principle be obtained from user-generated feedback.